[1]. This paper was written for delivery at a conference
on "The Future of the Book" organized by the International Center for
Semiotic and Cognitive Studies in the Republic of San Marino. I am
grateful to Geoffrey Nunberg of Xerox-PARC for the invitation to
speak, and to my hosts in San Marino for their hospitality.

[2]. This utilitarian information comes from the network
itself, from the useful service called Edupage, dated 26 May 1994.

[4]. The manuscript is Verona XXII (20) (see E.A.
Lowe, Codices Latini Antiquiores 4.490 [Oxford 1947], and
the discussion at Duchesne, op. cit. xxx-xxxi); the same
manuscript contains two other patristic collections of lives of
worthies (those of Jerome and Gennadius) and then a miscellany of
documents relating to ecclesiastical controversies of the early
sixth century germane to those in which Symmachus found himself
entangled.

[5]. See the path-breaking work of M. Vessey,
"Jerome's Origen: The Making of a Christian Literary
Persona", Studia Patristica XXVIII (Leuven 1993),
135-45; "Conference and Confession: Literary Pragmatics in
Augustine's 'Apologia contra Hieronymum'", Journal of Early
Christian Studies 1 (1993), 175-213; "Patristics and Literary
History", Journal of Literature and Theology 5 (1991),
341-54; and his "Ideas of Christian Writing in Late Roman Gaul",
unpubl. Oxford D.Phil. thesis, 1988; and J. O'Donnell, "The
Virtual Library: An Idea Whose Time Has Passed," in
Okerson/Mogge, edd., Gateways, Gatekeepers ... and Roles in
the Information Omniverse (Washington, D.C., 1994), 19-31.

[6]. See J. Richards, The Popes and the Papacy
in the Early Middle Ages, 476-752 (London 1979) 69-99. The
documents in question have still not had editions more recent
than the eighteenth century and would repay closer study. (At the time
this article was written [early 1994], I had not yet seen E. Wirbelauer,
Zwei Päpste in Rom: Der Konflikt zwischen Laurentius und
Symmachus (498-514). Studien und Texte (München 1993), which
includes editions of these texts, as well as a thorough discussion of the
whole controversy.)

[7]. Even scripture itself was gaining new
textual status as a written artifact in this period.
Leaving aside the important contribution of Jerome, self-
constructing as the Christian Origen (see Vessey, "Jerome's
Origen" [n. 5 supra]), in fixing scripture in Latin and
surrounding it with commentary, a recent study by G. Hahneman,
The Muratorian Fragment and the Development of the Canon
(Oxford, 1992), argues strongly that even the so-called
Muratorian Canon is no older than the late fourth century, and
with that downward redating all the earliest catalogues of the
Christian scriptural canon date to no earlier than the fourth
century, and only two of those (Eusebius and the Codex
Claromontanus) come from earlier than 350. In a Latin world in
which there was no such thing as a "Bible" (that is a complete
collection of scriptural books in one set of covers -- this was
apparently first seen in Latin at Cassiodorus' monastery in the
mid-sixth century and the oldest surviving example is the Codex
Amiatinus that was in some way modelled on Cassiodorus' own work
-- see my Cassiodorus [Berkeley 1979] 206-7), a good
handlist of canonical books was a vital tool for acquiring
accurate knowledge, but it only became vital when the written
text and not the written-text-as-mediated-by-authorized-
interpreter began to take on a central position of its own.

[9]. The phrase of course is that of Brian Stock,
The Implications of Literacy (Princeton 1982).

[10]. That sixth-century Verona fragment is part
of a small, famous collection rediscovered in that city in the
early eighteenth century by Scipio Maffei, but it is reasonable
to assume that the oldest continually managed collection of books
in the Latin world is that of the Vatican Library.

[11]. On the shaping of medieval libraries, see
R. McKitterick, The Carolingians and the Written Word
(Cambridge 1989) 165-210.

[12]. The roots of our ideologies of knowledge,
especially in their educational application, in late antique neo-
Platonism, deserve to be better understood; the seminal work is
I. Hadot, Arts libéraux et philosophie dans la
pensée antique (Paris 1984).

[13]. The classic modern studies are L. Febvre
and H.-J. Martin, L'apparition du livre (Paris 1958); M.
McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto 1962); E.
Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change
(Cambridge 1979; 2 volumes) and The Printing Revolution in
Early Modern Europe (Cambridge 1983); and now again H.-J.
Martin takes a broader view with pride of place for printing in
Histoire et pouvoirs de l'écrit (Paris 1988); see
also next note.

[17]. There is an irony here that should not be
missed. In early 1993, a small and select collection of precious
books from the Vatican Library traveled to the United States for
an exhibit at the Library of Congress. I was among the few
fortunate thousands who saw the books while they were there, and
vividly recall the display of the first page of the book of the
Apocalypse in the Urbino Bible just as you came into the exhibit
hall. But that is now for me only a memory, and even from San
Marino the book itself is many miles away and access is
restricted. It is accordingly of great value that the Library of
Congress undertook to make digitized images of the book pages on
display in their exhibit and to make them available on the
Internet. That very page of the Urbino Bible may now be
consulted from any suitably connected place on any of the seven
continents (follow the trail then to "Vatican Library", then "The City
Recovers", and finally "Urbino Bible"). On a properly equipped
machine, the image can be enlarged, cropped, enlarged again, with
remarkable accuracy of detail: I have seen it enlarged on a
projection screen to several times its original lifesize with
brilliant representation of the fine details of manuscript
painting. Even, I think, Duke Federigo would be impressed;
though I grant that both the esthetic and the devotional effect
are somewhat swamped by the technological wizardry.

[18]. Thus Vat. Urb. lat. 353 contains 7 works,
of which at least four are copied from editions published in 1474
and 1475, and the same could be true of the other three works the
MS contains; it was written for the Duke of Urbino between 1474
and 1482 (details apud Reeve [see next note]).

[19]. M.D. Reeve, 'Manuscripts Copied from Printed Books',
in Manuscripts in the Fifty Years After the Invention of Printing,
ed. J.B. Trapp (London 1983) 12-20. See also Curt F. Bühler, The
Fifteenth-Century Book (Philadelphia 1960), 34-39, still praised by
Reeve -- but Bühler's generalization (p. 16: "experience has taught
me that every manuscript to the second half of the fifteenth century is
potentially (and often without question) a copy of some incunable") is
tantalizing but still unsupported; H. Lülfing, 'Die Fortdauer der
handschriftlichen Buchherstellung nach der Erfindung des Buchdrucks - ein
buchgeschichtliches Problem', Buch und Text im 15. Jahrhundert, ed.
L. Hellinga and H. Härtel (Hamburg 1981) 17-26; and Cora E. Lutz,
'Manuscripts Copied from Printed Books', in her Essays on Manuscripts
and Rare Books (Hamden CT 1975), 129-38 (describing miscellaneous such
copies in the Beinecke Library at Yale).

[20]. Albert Derolez, The library of Raphael
de Marcatellis, abbot of St. Bavon's, Ghent, 1437-1508 (Ghent
1979), and especially 'The copying of printed books for
humanistic bibliophiles in the fifteenth century,' in From
Script to Book: A Symposium (Odense 1986), 140-60.

[22]. See John Monfasani, "The first call for
press censorship: Niccolo Perotti, Giovanni Andrea Bussi, Antonio
Moreto, and the editing of Pliny's Natural history,"
Renaissance Quarterly 41 (1988) 1-31; I owe this reference
to Brian Ogilvie of the University of Chicago.

[25]. The most meticulous study I have found on
evidence for this practice is Neil R. Ker, Pastedowns in
Oxford Bindings with a Survey of Oxford Binding c. 1515-1620
(Oxford 1954); I have profited as well from discussing the
subject with learned friends who handle incunables all the time,
especially G.N. Knauer and Barbara Halporn (the latter points out
that the Amerbach letters 'indicate that he and Koberger had a
lot of copies made for their use in preparing text for the press.
In the publication of the Bible with commentary of Hugo of St.
Cher they ran into a lot of heavy weather with the lending
monasteries because they worried about not getting their MSS back
or getting them back damaged' [personal communication, 9/93] --
which suggests that care for the old was common as long as the
old had value in itself).

Nicholson Baker, in the New Yorker (4 April 1994, pp.
68ff), attacks the destruction of the old card catalogues in
contemporary libraries in just the terms that students of the
Renaissance use for the destruction of old manuscripts in the
sixteenth century. In both cases, the critic values the old
cultural artifact as a thing in itself, full of information that
neither producer nor owner ever meant to be there. What was a
transparent guide, in the case of the manuscript of Aristotle, to
the wisdom of the ancients, and in the case of the card
catalogue, to the contents of a building's collection, becomes
for the humanist scholar an opaque and fascinating cultural
phenomenon in its own right. One may accept the validity of the
humanist approach while refraining from condemning others for not
cramming their attics with every cultural artifact ever
produced.

[24]. Quoted from A. Minnis and A.B. Scott,
Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c.1100 - c. 1375
(Oxford 1988) 269; Minnis instances the work of Mary and Richard
Rouse, now conveniently available in Mary A. and Richard H.
Rouse, Authentic witnesses: approaches to medieval texts and
manuscripts (Notre Dame, Ind., 1991), who have shown at
length how the distinctive applications of print to the
organization of knowledge were often anticipated by indices and
concordances in medieval manuscripts, devices that needed print
for full realization of their potential.

[26]. ed. K. Arnold, with introduction and German
translation, Würzburg 1973. For a more cautious reading of
this text than that ventured here, see N.L. Brann, The Abbot
Trithemius (1462-1516): The Renaissance of Monastic Humanism
(Leiden 1982), 144-74.

[31]. To name only a few favorites by which I
have been influenced, see R. Chartier, The Cultural Uses of
Print in Early Modern France (Princeton 1987); L. Hunt, ed.,
The Invention of Pornography (New York 1993); L. Jardine,
Erasmus, Man of Letters (Princeton 1993); R. Darnton,
The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge,
Mass., 1982).

[32].The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto 1962)
contained all in nuce, while Understanding
Media (New York 1964) was the explicit summa and
The Medium is the Message (New York 1967) was as it were
the summa pauperum of this cult.

[34]. Here is the point to acknowledge that I
have had much profit in reading and rereading Richard Lanham,
The Electronic Word (Chicago 1993), which I have reviewed
in Bryn Mawr Classical Review 94.6.13; Lanham is a
theoretician of the new who has learned much from McLuhan's
example, and from the deeper springs of the rhetorical tradition
that originates in ancient Athens as well.

[35]. The last generation or so of patristic
scholars has worked very hard indeed to figure out what a
"miracle" is, and the results have been, candidly, massive
failure. Gregory the Great has scandalized the moderns with
especial effectiveness here; the best study, a glorious failure
past which successors make no real advance, is P. Boglioni,
"Miracle et nature chez Grégroire le Grand", Cahiers
d'études médiévales (Montréal
1974) 1.11-102; Peter Brown's The Cult of the Saints
(Chicago 1981) esp. 17-22 on what he calls the "two-tiered model"
that has distorted modern appreciation, puts the difficulties
well; best is A. Rousselle, Croire et Guérir: la foi
en Gaule dans l'Antiquité tardive (Paris 1990), who
succeeds by refusing to address the question of miracle in its
familiar form and observing instead strucures of practice.

[37]. In its extreme form, the view appears in J.
Hammer, "Cassiodorus, the Saviour of Western Civilization",
Bulletin of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in
America 3(1944-45), 369-84; but the expectation that
C. would be some such figure implicitly underlies the magisterial
review of my book by Av. Cameron, "Cassiodorus Deflated",
Journal of Roman Studies 71(1981) 183-86, and indeed a
decade later, in her textbook The Mediterranean World in Late
Antiquity AD 395-600 (London 1993) 42, in a sentence
footnoted with reference to my book, Cameron reverts to the old
orthodoxy and says exactly what she knows to be untrue. I have
also had the experience of hearing the book praised publicly by
an eminent scholar who went on to say that it was a very
"depressing" book. Clearly, the traditional Cassiodorus fills a
need in our mental furniture of his time of transition, a
need that persists beyond all reasonable refutation.

[38]. Cassiodorus is himself apparently the first
figure we know of to have used that scheme, in a treatise on
calculating the date of Easter, but it was Bede who put it into
general circulation a century and a half later.

[40]. So Benedict Biscop found copies of some
books (including the Bible that in some way inspired the Codex
Amiatinus) in Rome to take back to Northumbria, while at the
Carolingian monastery of Murbach, Cassiodorus' Institutes
provided a basis for the library catalogue: see my
Cassiodorus 238-55.

[41]. One may debate the self-consciousness of
reformers like Charlemagne and Alcuin, but best to see now Roger
Wright, Later Latin and Early Romance (Liverpool 1982) for
implicit sober critique of the latter and the destructive
power of his vision of "Latin".

[42]. The word is apposite; Cassiodorus is the
first figure we know of to use the word modernus in a way
approximating our modern sense: see W. Freund, Modernus und
andere Zeitbegriffe des Mittelalters (Köln and Graz
1957).

[43]. Two examples may be given: the way
marginal notae are used to tag passages in his Psalm
commentary for their relevance to the study of various aspects of
the seven liberal arts (these may be seen, in a grossly
inadequate edition, in the Corpus Christianorum edition of that
commentary); and in the way the mnemonic illustration are used in
the Institutes to organize material on the page (see F.
Troncarelli, "'Con la mano del curore.' L'arte della memoria nei
codici di Cassiodoro", Quaderni medievali 22 (December
1986), 22-58.

[45]. Take, for example, the Directory of Electronic
Journals, Newsletters, and Academic Discussion Lists, ed. A.L. Okerson
(Washington, DC: Association of Research Libraries, 4th edition, 1994):
the map is not the territory, but creation of a good map (and this
directory is an excellent map) often has the effect of giving the
territory a self-conscious identity and opening it up to exploration by
many others.

[47]. P.H. Jolly, "Antonello da Messina's 'St.
Jerome in His Study': a disguised portrait?" Burlington
Magazine 124(1982) 27-29, arguing from details of the
cardinalatial costume in which Jerome is portrayed.

[48]. S. de Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell
(New York 1989), has the great merit of dis-iconification and
hence (paradoxically) perilously enriches our sense of the
possibilities of self-identification with the Florentine.

z
[49]. Such iconic representation of the scholar has its
uses. Can we imagine a future in which the professor becomes a variety of
software, an icon you click on in order to get access to the network of
information he surveys? That future is close at hand: for description
and demonstration of such a pedagogy as it is now possible and practiced,
see http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/teachdemo.